Sad Puppies BOOK BOMB! Best Related Work and Campbell Award for Best New Writer

This is our last Sad Puppies 3 Book Bomb. Remember, you’ve only got a few more days to get your nominations in for the Hugo awards.

If you are just joining us, a Book Bomb is where we get as many people as possible to get a book on Amazon on the same day, in order to spike the sales rating as high as possible, so that it will end up on some bestseller lists and show up in front of all new readers who wouldn’t normally see it. Success breeds success, and the author gets new fans.

The Sad Puppies bombs are special because these are the works in the different categories that the Evil Legion of Evil has put forth as suggestions for our Hugo nomination slate. The last two we did went amazing.

Note, not all of these are available on Amazon. If that is the case then we put a link to where you can get it, or something else, so that the author can GET PAID. 🙂

**Best Related Work**

This is one of those weird little catch all categories that is often dominated by some really cliquish nonsense. We’ve got some big brain essays, hard science, philosophy, military strategy, and of course Mad Mike.

The Campbell isn’t actually a Hugo, but is nominated and voted on at the same time, and the award is given at the same time, so it is pretty much the Hugo for best new author. This is the one that I came in dead last for, which was lucky because we were warned if I had won it would have ended literature forever.

Remember, Amazon has changed how they calculate the sales rank. There is a long delay now. We won’t see any ranking movement until this evening, and hit the highs during the night or tomorrow morning. That has turned out okay because it just gives the authors more attention later. I’ll put the initial rankings up here in a minute.

I am genuinely bemused at the absence from your slate of the second (and concluding) volume of Bill Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein, surely the most substantial work of non-fiction published last year.

I’m an observer of this process, not a participant in it, and an observation is not a gripe. (And, being British, I’m very accustomed to the best work by our writers being entirely ignored by the Hugos. How many nominations do Iain Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, Terry Pratchett and Alastair Reynolds have between them?) But the first volume of Patterson’s book was beaten into second place by Chicks Dig Time Lords, which may have more substance than the title suggests (I haven’t read it), but, you know, meh. I’m amazed that no one associated with this slate is sufficiently interested to have read and recommended it, and if mentioning it here draws it to anyone’s attention, then it’s worth doing. It would be genuinely tragic if Patterson’s life’s work lost out again.

Nothing at all to apologise for, Larry (if I may). I understand that feelings run high over this, though from where I sit it’s a bit hard to see why. I have never known winning a Hugo, or a Nebula, or any other sf award to have any detectable effect on sales.

On the contrary, winning a Hugo has become a sort of anti-sales device.

For that to be true wouldn’t the Hugo have to be well known and unpopular?

I suspect that most people who see a book in the store with “Hugo Winner” splashed on the cover won’t have heard of the Hugo awards, so they will either not care at all, or think an award of some kind must be good.

I’m not going to gripe that it’s not on your list, Larry, as there’s only so many slots and it’s your list not mine, but I am going to mention it for extra consideration, as I have done here several times before. The second volume of Patterson’s bio of Heinlein is certainly worthy of consideration as a Best Related Work. Even if Volume 1 did lose to that [sarc]indispensable magnum opus of scholarly acumen, Chicks Dig Time Lords.[/sarc] SMH

Patterson’s work is excellent, both in whole and in part, and is not remotely rad-lib. Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Vol. 2- The Man Who Learned Better, 1948-1988 by William Patterson,

I’d have happily considered it for SP3, alas, nobody pinged me on it. With so much fiction and non-fiction available each year, sometimes we need help knowing what’s worth noticing. I wish somebody would have pointed a (virtual) finger at this volume and said, “Hey, look!” Having said that, I think Wright’s book a very strong related work. As is Lou Antonelli’s. Hell, they’re all strong. Otherwise they’d not be on the list. I am bummed to have missed the Heinlein bio, though. Sorry!

I think the main purpose of the Sad Puppies is to draw attention to works that might otherwise be overlooked. I think the Heinlein biography is a case where it will probably be on the ballot on its own merits and doesn’t need a boost. I’d be very surprised if it ISN’T on the ballot.

Thanks again to Larry, Brad and all of the Puppies! I think this crowd will like Kikayon. It’s a stand-alone novelette that previously appeared in The Grantville Gazette, but it’s *also* a sequel to Totaled, set some 200 years after Totaled ends.

Sorry, Glyer, I quit reading you after the first few articles where you insinuated a bunch of asinine things about me. I can only read about how I’m a barbaric, anti-intellectual, over reacting, liar, who wants people to vote stupidly without reading things first, before it bores the shit out of me. So now I just get the highlights from my readers.

I’m sure it was a fantastic work. I love Heinlein. But I haven’t read it. Maybe if you wanted us to put it on the SP slate, you should have actually talked to us about it instead of writing a bunch of condescending articles.

We apply a social justice warrior bigotry algorithm to any work: white straight male – multiply by 100. Everyone else- divide by 100. Anything having to do with Heinlein is ineligible. We’re not actually voting for any of this stuff. We’re just pretending what we would vote for if we weren’t all such incredible racists. Most of us in fact are in retreat, checking our privilege at a secluded Shaolin Temple and reading the collected works of Octavia Butler. Luckily the privilege sweat-lodge has wi-fi.

Actually, now that I think about it, if we had run with the Heinlein bio, all the Heinlein haters on the Left (and they are legion) would have been crying about how we’re just using the slate to push Heinlein again; because all right-wingers are slavish devotees of Heinlein, and therefore we’re somehow bad. John Scalzi even said so. And Scalzi is never wrong. (blinks eyes stupidly)

That’s the first thing that came to my mind. The cross-hairs never waver – not for a minute. The straight white man loses coming and going in the stacked deck behind social justice warrior ideology. Observation and self-contradicting facts come later, or usually not at all.

In a typical fit of ironic unawareness, Mary Robinette Kowal Tweets back “Yeah. Everytime I hear ‘Women can’t…,’ bullshit instantly comes to mind,” a thing I agree with 100%. The difference is I can actually document the bullshit in quotes.

You have a point there, Brad, but they already shot down Volume 1 with extreme prejudice, so I’m guessing it really wouldn’t have changed the results from that particular quarter. I’m just being noisy about it being worthy at this point.

And yes, I should have been more vocal about it earlier in the process., and Larry is correct that it’s going to get plenty of nom votes on its own merit without any added push.

I’m never going to understand how these people hate the guy who wrote about hippy free love Martian Jesus.

Well for starters, in that very volume on the subject of homosexuality:

“Jill suspected that Mike would grok a ‘wrongness’ in the poor in-betweeners anyhow–they would never be offered water.”

and one “you suck” cancels 20 atta-boys. So the different outlook of the characters in Time Enough for Love doesn’t help.

There is also considerable anger about Heinlein’s female characters, and then don’t forget the nipples that went spung! in Number of the Beast. I do wonder what he might do differently if he were writing today.

This is all on top of Heinlein’s individualist streak and haven’t you heard; Heinlein is a facist, just ask Paul Verhoeven. So one Starship Troopers cancels 20 Stranger in a Strange Lands.

Doubtless the open minded, fair and just crew at SFWA that celebrated No White Male authors in the previous Hugo honoree line up will ensure careful consideration and promotion of Mr. Patterson ‘ s work.

That was the Nebulas. Read this if you want the delusional female supremacist take on how the bestest won the Nebulas because the stories “were not the standard Anglostraightmale heroes.” There’s the politicized lesbian definition of “quality.”

Doubtless the open minded, fair and just crew at SFWA that celebrated No White Male authors in the previous Hugo honoree line up will ensure careful consideration and promotion of Mr. Patterson ‘ s work.

As James May pointed out, SFWA awards the Nebula, not the Hugo. There isn’t a Nebula for related work.

For the Hugo, the careful consideration comes from the Hugo voters, who are the attending members and supporting members of Worldcon. If you aren’t one, you can become one, though it’s too late for the nomination stage, you could still vote on the final ballot.

@ James, @ Khazlek – thank you for the correction and clarification. FWIW, I am confident that the good folks that celebrated the absence of white male authors from the ’14 Nebulas and chose to nominate for the ’15 Hugos will surely have overlooked Patterson’s race and sex and suggested his work on its merits.

That way, despite it’s absence on the Slatening, we can still vote for it.

Just read another Nebula-nominated short. It’s yet another in the brand new sub-genre of intersectional feminist racial and sexual revenge fantasies. This time men rape and sell mermaids to be eaten as food. A mermaid grants a wish to a 15 yr. old girl that all the “rape culture” men in the story should die, which includes her own family. Beer-gardens, start your engines.

In a post about the story, the gay author Alyssa Wong (you can see her essay in the QUEERS DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION Kickstarter) hints “a field that was once very white and male” is the opposite of words like “broaden” and “nurture.” There is the usual offensive innuendo about “The aftereffects of colonialism” where it is made very clear who that means. By the time you get to the “marginalized groups – women and QUILTBAG people” and the story being about “the effects of systematic violence against women. Its protagonist is a young brown girl; its focus, dealing with injustice that you’ve grown up with,” you realize it’s just more of the anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western intersectional self-pity and droning of an insect that is its own explanation for failure; bigotry, racism and resentment hiding behind a facade of justice.

Should we be surprised the story was written at an actual Clarion Writers’ Workshop, or that her instructors were Andy Duncan and Nalo Hopkinson, or that Duncan co-wrote the anti-white Nebula-nominated “Wakulla Springs”?

Revenge stories like this aren’t exactly uncommon in the genre or even mythology, but when they’re all concentrated in one place like this it’s pretty obvious what you’re looking at. A guy like Ray Bradbury might write a revenge story for the “other,” – the so-called “marginalized” – take up the cause of the underdog – but when will the “other” write a story for Ray Bradbury? That is an analogy to a principled genre that observes the success and failure of the human spirit – not one race or sex – and those same principles standing behind a thing like our Constitution as opposed to naked identity advocacy. This is why I despise everything social justice warriors stand for. Taken to its logical extension – a thing ironically beyond the power of these new SF writers to do – SJWs would dismantle our Constitution. What’s more of a canary in a coal mine than a woman creating a racially segregated space who has a history of anti-white racial slurs and calling it all “anti-racism” and then asking us to take a year-long break from heterosexual white male literature?

I call things by their true name, and this is all nothing more than an intersectional feminist KKK. Anyone dumb enough to be a part of it deserves all the scorn and ridicule I can muster. The other truth is this: in the social justice warrior SFF community, if you exchange the word “feminist” with politicized non-white lesbian ideology, you’ll be correct more than incorrect. These are not “feminists”; that’s camouflage.

This really has nothing to do with gay people per se, but about bigots who happen to be gay and their loony intersectional ideology of racial and gender supremacy. That crucial difference is one SJWs will ignore to make it seem we are anti-gay. Essentially that means one can never oppose what a woman, gay person of non-white says – EVER! And that’s exactly the way SJWs want it. That’s what SJWs use in place of an argument. Of course that’s as loony as saying talking back to the KKK is being anti-white.

Wong just retweeted a conversation with all the usual suspects: Aliette de Bodard, Rose Fox, Charles Tan and J.Y. Yang. They sit on Twitter and make it their business to light up whites daily. Ken Liu, the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award winning translator of the now Nebula-nominated SFF novel The Three-Body Problem is there too. He Tweeted:

“‘authentic’ seems often to mean ‘what white people would approve’”

Really? Fuck you too.

Get the picture? In stupid-land, that all equals us being a pack of right-wingnut racists. These people hate us, and it’s pretty damn clear it has nothing to do with “politics.” It’s for waking up in the morning.

I wonder if amazon delayed their ratings to prevent…fake book bombs. I don’t think it was book bombs though as much as other stuff, I think they delayed it to prevent temporary buys>cancels in order to temporarily boost ratings. Now they delay it until it’s too late to cancel or at least cancel easily.

Should we be surprised the story was written at an actual Clarion Writers’ Workshop, or that her instructors were Andy Duncan and Nalo Hopkinson, or that Duncan co-wrote the anti-white Nebula-nominated “Wakulla Springs”?

Anti-white? I think that may be a bit over the top.

Spoilers follow, but I doubt anyone here is dying to read it.

Wakulla Springs is a meandering thing in which stuff starts to happen near Wakulla Springs and then it cuts away to a new scene years later. It does this two or three times and nothing much that happens ever gets resolved in a way one expects from a story. Somone chats with a chimp in a scene that is probably a dream. The conclusion seems to be that the springs are themselves a character and weird things tend to happen around them and at the very end there is a suggestion that there is a lagoon creature living in them, which aside from the dream-like chimp chat, is the only fantastic element in the story, which presumably is supposed to be fantasy. It’s beautifully written and isn’t really much of a story. I sure hope that isn’t what Clarion is trying to encourage.

It starts out during the making of one of the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies in which Weismuller is depicted as a Hollywood asshole who seduces a poor black girl and abandons her. I really don’t know whether that is a fair characterization of Weismuller, though I note that one of the online bios I found said that the studio paid his wife to agree to a divorce so he would be more appealing as a leading man.

It depicts racism, in rural Florida, in the thirties. I don’t think that makes it anti-white. Are Harry Turtledove’s Timeline 191 novels, in which the Confederacy survives for decades, and which depicts civil-war levels of racism, anti-white?

I think where James’ complaint enter the picture, isn’t in the writing, but the reading. How did this barely-a-fantasy end up on the short lists for both Hugo and Nebula? I think it very likely that its depiction of racism meant that it was seen as speaking the truth about white patriarchy and therefore checks all the right boxes.

I think by motive you are saying that Turtledove didn’t intend to portray all white men as racists and sexists and the authors of Wakulla spring did. I didn’t spot that in the text. Perhaps, since you know more about the authors than I do, that you are employing knowledge outside the text. I’d rather not take that approach; it sounds like that Radish Reviews argument that there was no point in reading the Sad Puppy nominees because they were all fascists.

I’m not sure where you are going with context. Perhaps you could elaborate.

I wouldn’t know where to start to elaborate. The Radish Reviews “argument” is not an argument at all, since it’s all made up bullshit straw men in scare quotes. SJWs in essence are enrolling us in an ideology they consider an opposite to theirs but which doesn’t exist. It’s not like they don’t have blogs to make a case for it and use quotes. They have none and no case to make. Comparing me to that oafish bag of wind is idiotic. She pre-bans commenters and some of her favorites are hate-Tweeters like Veronica Schanoes, who is only slightly less scary than Shanley Kane, Mikkie Kendall and Lauren Chief Elk. You’re talking about a cult which stares at a group photo of white conrunners, declares a secret KKK, and then writes a frickin’ blog post about it. You’re talking about morons who’ve banned Frank Frazetta cuz sexism and patriarchy.

Contrary to what SJWs assert, I’m not a conservative, Mens’ Rights Activist, homophobe, white supremacist, woman-hater or Islamophobe. SJWs consider any opposition to them defaults to a de facto ideology that is all those things. Hell, Bradford’s calling us all Mens’ Right Activists just cuz we don’t bow before her racism. My ideology is simple: it’s called fair play.

And yes I do have knowledge outside the text. Each person will use that or ignore it as fits their personality. I’m not saying what to do with it, I’m just saying it’s there. Pretending it’s not there isn’t the same thing as saying “I don’t care about that stuff.”

Some people do care cuz they like to be informed about when they’re reading a KKK literature. Things simply make more sense. Without an understanding of the intersectionality/Judith Butler race/Queer Theory fusion surrounding award nominated stories like “The Fisher Queen,” “The Devil in America,” “The Weight of the Sunrise,” Ancillary Justice, and “Wakulla Springs,” those stories don’t even make any sense. However they do make sense to the people voting for them, who are ironically honoring what is outside the text more than what is within. Only a hillbilly thinks Ancillary Justice is one of the all-time great SF novels. But it certainly is if you support lesbian Butlerian non-binary ideology. The outside outweighs the inside, and that’s true for all those mediocre works. You damn well better believe those stories weren’t voted on by their merits. By merit alone they verge on fanfiction.

My own point in signal boosting all this is to let people know about the bizarre and obscure cult behind all this and what their goals and agenda are. The amount of not-so-behind-the-scences networking on all this is incredible. How the hell else does some nothing story like “The Fisher Queen” straight out of a writing workshop get onto a Nebula shortlist if not for correct lesbian racethink? All the bad menz die – what a coinkadink.

The larger points are all this is killing the art and that it is so blanketing, immune to reason and fanatic there’s not even a reason to engage these people. The SFWA and WorldCon are parties you don’t go to and lakes you don’t swim in; there are other lakes and parties. I don’t have to go to KKK meetings to have a picnic or toast marshmallows. I don’t have to hang out with idiots who think I should die in a fire cuz I don’t believe in Foucaldian post-structual French Queer Theory semantics that means L. Correia hates women cuz of the word “pussy.” Don’t you understand these very creepy people actually believe that?

It could be argued that a book does not need an illustration of a scantily clad woman with a sword (or just a scantily-clad women being saved by a big, hulking male warrior) on its cover. Frazetta did that, and people don’t like that these days, so he gets called on that (not that I necessarily agree, or course.)

However they do make sense to the people voting for them, who are ironically honoring what is outside the text more than what is within.

Similarly, it seems to me that a declaration that Wakula Springs is anti-white criticizes the book more for what is outside the text that what is within, and it got on the Hugo and Nebula short lists more for what is outside the text than within.

That is why I brought up the Radish Reviews, because she planned to no-award all Sad Puppies nominees based only on considerations outside the text. I grant that unlike her, you actually have a pretty good idea about what the writers are like, based on things that they have written or said, while she based most of her opinion of what the the Sad Puppies writers are like on purest voodoo.

The SFWA and WorldCon are parties you don’t go to and lakes you don’t swim in; there are other lakes and parties. I don’t have to go to KKK meetings to have a picnic or toast marshmallows. I don’t have to hang out with idiots who think I should die in a fire cuz I don’t believe in Foucaldian post-structual French Queer Theory semantics that means L. Correia hates women cuz of the word “pussy.” Don’t you understand these very creepy people actually believe that?

I don’t believe that I’ve ever had anyone push French literary theory on me at a science fiction convention. I did have one unpleasant encounter with a woman who I think is quite probably the sort of person you are talking about. It wasn’t at a Worldcon, and it was at a program item that was about gender, so I couldn’t really be surprised.

I do encounter quite a few leftists at SF cons, and a few idiots turn up here and there, along with a bunch of smart people.

I do plan to attend Worldcon this summer, and I plan to have a good time. I don’t plan to attend Wiscon, which advertises itself as the sort of place you might find people who use “intersectional” unironically.

My criticism of SJW affirmative action is usually more along the lines of what’s outside the text in terms of the race and sex of the author and so the quality of the story. When N.K. Jemisin and Saladin Ahmed were nominated for Nebulas there was nothing anti-anything in the work itself. They shifted locale and race but didn’t go after anyone in the stories. The work wasn’t hateful it just wasn’t very good. Ancillary Justice isn’t hateful.

But I have noticed this sub-genre I call racial revenge fantasies creeping into the picture. They always take place in the past, usually as alternate history. They’re most often centered around colonialism, Jim Crow or slavery and usually short stories. There’s absolutely no doubt they’re digs at the straight white man. Here’s the blurb for an anthology of such work:

“This anthology of speculative fiction stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focuses on the viewpoints of the colonized. Sixteen authors share their experiences of being the silent voices in history and on the wrong side of the final frontier; their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don’t get to tell us how they won every war; their revenge against the alien oppressor settling their ‘new world’.”

So what’s the point of writing or honoring a story like “Wakulla Springs” in 2014? It absolutely is meant to be the by now usual dig at white people and there is no doubt it presents an unsympathetic view of whites and was meant to. Intersectionalism is largely about comparing itself favorably to straight white men. In fact it never shuts up about it. Without that, WisCon doesn’t even exist as an institution. The bleeding crossover from WisCon into the Hugos and Nebulas is unmistakable. It’s not like these people aren’t advertising this when they are literally asking us to not read stories by straight white men for a year.

By contrast, think what intersectionalists never write about; it’s not like there wasn’t N. African and Turkish slavery and Mughal and Manchu colonialism. Where’s those alt-histories from such searching minds who otherwise never shut up about global and historic injustice? You think these great minds are thinking about writing a short story like “Wakulla Springs” for Christian Copts in Egypt? Keep dreaming. They’d never dare do such a thing.

So the authors of “Wakulla Springs” aren’t interested in “oppression” per se or the larger human expression of it or in bending minds but instead in targeting a very specific group and leaving everyone else alone. And that is based on the rules of intersectionalism, not a larger principle of human suffering. For that type of perceptual shift you have to go to the Golden Age these people despise and yet which did what they cannot and will not do.

There is no intersectional version of Bradbury’s “The Big Black and White Game, “Way High Up in the Air,” or “The Other Shoe.” There is no intersectional version of of Van Vogt’s Clane stories or Edmond Hamilton’s “Conquest of Two Worlds” and “He That Hath Wings.” There is no intersectional version of C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and many others I could name. Those are principled stories of larger human empathy, not the sordid identity narcissism of radical feminism. Intersectionalism lacks that very empathy for others but which it conspicuously claims for itself. Intersectionalism does not critique itself as did mid-century SF. There is no such thing as an intersectionalist Terry Pratchett; it cannot produce such a writer nor satirize itself. Were intersectionalism what it claims to be, it would in fact write that story of Egypt – it can’t.

As for WorldCon I can certainly see who won last year. Intersectionalism was the star, though I doubt most people have any idea who Judith Butler or Audre Lorde is. It just all flies under this vague banner of social justice and goodthink. That’s how mainstreaming works and how people who never heard of Charlotte Bunch start Tweeting “Smash the Patriarchy” without the slightest hint of what it is they are championing.

“I think where James’ complaint enter the picture, isn’t in the writing, but the reading. How did this barely-a-fantasy end up on the short lists for both Hugo and Nebula?”

This was my problem with Wakulla Springs, as well. On a technical level, it was well-written (albeit somewhat meandering and lacking much in the way of dramatic tension). Had it been nominated for a non-SFF award, I would’ve voted for it in a heartbeat. But a Hugo or Nebula? No. It wasn’t a genre piece.

“Wakulla Springs” was lazy satire and a good idea 60 years too late. If I’m inspired by the ha-ha effect of pink flamingos on suburban lawns and the world’s largest ball of twine I need to do something with that, shift the perspective. Instead Duncan and Klages literally gave us the twine and flamingos. Why not put it on another planet in the future? That’s what SF does; it reflects the essence of a thing back at us. I already know what kitsch is, give me something different.

Worse is the social commentary. If there was a worthwhile message or lesson there aside from targeting white men, it would’ve remained intact by again shifting it onto another planet and into the future to show the essence of the thing. There was nothing there, and hadn’t been for decades. They tried to do a Bradbury and failed because they don’t have his talent, perspective and humanism.

That’s where social justice warrior stupidity enters. These people literally believe Jim Crow isn’t dead. This is a story that should’ve been published in the early ’60s or in the ’40s or ’50s. “Wakulla Springs” is symbolic of the entire social justice movement in SFF today: they are as anxious to be Jim Crow Freedom Riders and to keep that alive as they are reluctant to admit that party’s over. Talking about race and gender in the sense of “Wakulla Springs” makes no sense. There is no true satire in intersectionalism; it is incapable of it. These are authors who think they are “fighting the good fight” in a war long dead while throwing around junk about a “climate” revolving around “previously marginalized populations within the field” of SFF and “a discussion about race and gender” and “power struggles” that rings false. Bradbury succeeded because he showed little truths, not little lies. He was no SJW, even though he was a guy who’d literally cry over films and books.

The fact the story isn’t even genre should be a wake-up call their so-called “hot-button” issues would be even more boring in outer space. I can read “hot-button” issues in the newspaper. The truth is Klages and Duncan don’t have the chops to address this issue in a humanistic principled manner and disguise their cultural markers in a way that would’ve enabled a true re-visiting to a subject. They felt the need to blurt out and publish what should’ve been research for a story long away and in some future.

There’s a reason Ray Bradbury is Ray Bradbury. He never would’ve made the mistake of revisiting a thing like, say, the charge up San Juan Hill without riding above it and showing a larger human principle instead of demonizing the Spanish. There is satire like The Wind and the Lion and then there is there is carrying buckets of kool-aid for a pack of racists whining about being “marginalized.” These people need to start naming actual authors who are being marginalized or shut up. What I see is the exact opposite: taking gay PoC women out of a writing workshop and throwing them right into the Nebulas and then acting like it’s a coincidence no white men won because meritocracy.

The stupid satire there is SJWs actually publicly collude to marginalize careers based on race and sex. They say no, we are doing that but don’t have the quotes. I do have the quotes… from them. No white men won, don’t read white men, white men have privilege cuz Jim Crow.

I haven’t followed the Hugo thing much except for this year, but the anti-Heinlein thing leaves me dumbfounded. Over the years I have literally read all his work multiple times, and I still read his YA stuff again every few years with the comforting familiarity of an old friend who helped me develop my own moral barometer when I was young (which is apparently evil and outdated now?)

How can anyone argue that they want diversity and differing perspectives in science fiction and do anything but tip their hat to Heinlein. His characters were incredibly socially progressive by today’s standards, much less for the time they were written and they are littered with characters that fall under the SJW umbrella of right-think.

Off the top of my head, in addition to the previous mentioned SIaSL references:
The moon is a harsh mistress: Mixed race protagonist in an atypical marriage whose story at one point highlights the bigotry common in the US when it was written. By the way, every female in that story was passionate, opinionated, and willing to fight for their beliefs. And it was published in 1966, when a mixed race polygamy wasn’t trendy.

I will fear no evil: First time I can recall a trans-character other than Andrew Libby Long from another work of his. Both are portrayed positively.

Can anyone give me an example of a weak woman in a Heinlein work? The character whose nipples went “sprung” was a genius mathematician who was strong physically and ended up second in command to the other female character, who was if anything more in control.

Hell, even in the Puddin’ short work he lampooned body dismorphia (and I now have to punch myself in the face for using body dismorphia in a sentence).

His most potent political statements were take control of your government (meaning Americans, not sub categories) and TANSTAAFL.

But science fiction writers hating Heinlein is like scientologists hating L. Ron Hubbard. Or an engineer refusing to use geometry because they hate Greek people.

And stranger because SF/F is the “misfit” genre, and they are preaching acceptance. Does Sue Grafton hate Dashiell Hammett? I’ve never heard Terry Pratchett express a desire to kick P.G. Wodehouse’s ass. From an outsider’s perspective this looks like it boils down to “They want to steal our rocket statues!!!”.

On a separate note I’ve enjoyed reading “the Fisk of God”‘s archives almost as much as the MHI books.

You can’t understand it. They don’t read. They just declare things based on feelings. And they make shit up. Once something has been declared, anybody who steps out of line from group think gets eaten. So it doesn’t matter what Heinlein actually did or said, it is how they feel about the things they imagine that he said based upon what other people said about books they haven’t read.

Re: Khazlek
I’ll concede the Hubbard analogy was exaggerated, but like him or not a lot of the SF tropes of today were new (or newer) ideas when Heinlein was writing them, and his impact on the genre as a whole is hard to ignore. I’d argue his impact was greater E.E. Smith or ERB (both of whom obviously influenced Heinlein)

I’ll stick with the math example… You may not like Johann Keppler, but you still need to acknowledge his work to plot an orbit.

You’re assuming the core ideology which judges Heinlein does so out of logic and politics rather than a biological hatred. At best Heinlein is an “ally,” a broken thing that can never be truly fixed and fit only to “#justlisten” and then carry water. Heinlein committed too many other sins (Sixth Column, Farnham’s Freehold, etc.) to even be an “ally.” To an intersectionalist he was a broken clock right twice a day to be otherwise reviled as an ethnic European heterosexual male who benefitted from privilege, patriarchy and settler colonialism. I am paraphrasing rhetoric straight from the horses’ mouth. Heinlein’s real problem was that he woke up in the morning, the same as Jews for a neo-Nazi and blacks for the KKK.

You only need to read the joint review (and dreary comments) of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at the feminist The Book Smugglers site to understand where these people are coming from.

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“Women’s Liberation lacks direction now because it has failed to understand the importance of heterosexuality in maintaining male supremacy and hecause it has failed to face class and race as real differences in women’s behavior and political needs. The Lesbian rejects male sexual/political domination; she defies his world, his social organization, his ideology, and his definition of her as inferior. Lesbians cannot grow politically or personally in a situation which denies the basis of our politics: that Lesbianism is political, that heterosexuality is crucial to maintaining male supremacy.”

That’s gay feminist Charlotte Bunch in 1972, also (Founding Director (1989) and as of 2014 current Senior Scholar, at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University), member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, selected by United States President Bill Clinton as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.

The question then becomes: is the racialized gender abolition ideology of Charlotte Bunch core to Social Justice Warrior ideology? The answer is: absolutely. Without Bunch and others like Audre Lorde, there is no such thing as an SJW, no Book Smugglers, no white privilege. That goes for Brianna Wu and Anitia Sarkeesian too; take away Bunch and Lorde and those two literally do not exist in video gaming.

A elite group of connoisseurs acts like a curatorship that creates the benchmarks for “this is what is good.” A readership bereft of that creates a Tower of Babel where anything is anything. An unprincipled ideological agenda creates garbage. Modern SF has gone from the first to the third phase and is heading to who knows what; dissolution perhaps.

Core SFF as represented by the Hugos and Nebulas today are to old SFF what Penelope Pitstop/Wacky Races is to Warner Bros. cartoons.